Black bottom saints, p.25
Black Bottom Saints, page 25
A few weeks into the term, Colored Girl’s mother announced, via a long-distance hall phone, that she was coming to Nashville to receive a service award from one of the many organizations where she volunteered.
There were four at the table: Sophia, Colored Girl, her mother, and her mother’s colleague. During the appetizer the mother put her hand on Colored Girl’s thigh. Colored Girl left the table. The mother was smiling. Sophia excused herself and followed Colored Girl. When Sophia found her, Colored Girl was shaking, having just vomited. Sophia gently asked her friend if she was bulimic. Colored Girl started laughing. Sophia pulled a flask out of her purse. Colored Girl took three big swallows, shook herself, then told Sophia about “quality time” on the farm. “Today. It has to end today,” said Colored Girl. Sophia said, “As soon as we get back to the table, just say that.”
They returned to the table. Colored Girl sat down. The mother chastised them for staying so long in the restroom. They ordered food. When the waiter left, Colored Girl said, “This has got to stop.” The mother played it off as if her daughter was talking about her being an audaciously demanding mother, wanting A’s, annoyed that Colored Girl decided to go to Fisk when she could have gone to an Ivy. Colored Girl jabbed, “You know what I’m talking about.” Her mother followed with a stern, “This is not the time or place.” Colored Girl stammered back, “This has got to stop.” The mother’s friend asked, nervously laughing, not knowing what was going on, “Are you quoting the Van Morrison song?” Pouncing on the possibility that the older guest’s ignorance and innocence made candor more difficult, the mother asked, “What are you talking about?”
Colored Girl said nothing. She was drowning in shaming silence. Sophia wasn’t having it. “You. When you threatened her with foster care? Or with her father killing you and him ending up in jail? Stop. You touching her. She’s eighteen and I have a trust fund. She’s not going to foster care and you might go to jail. Stop!”
The mother stood up. Lifted her chin. Smoothed her skirt. “That was an A-1 performance. This lunch is over. I’ve written my last tuition check. Both of you leave.” The mother thought the public dismissal would provoke Colored Girl to panic, to fight, to defiantly insist on staying. But Sophia’s words had dazed Colored Girl. Sophia rose, rested a hand on her friend’s shoulder, then led her out of the room.
That night in Jubilee Hall the two young people drank Hennessy straight from the bottle and danced around a dorm room with a 45 of “Stop, in the Name of Love” playing on repeat.
Before they called it a night, Colored Girl declared her mother “dead” and gave Sophia a new nickname, L. D., for Lynette Dobbins. Then C. G. told L. D. a story about two kids who didn’t drown and a parent who did, long ago in Alabama.
Lynette Dobbins Taylor
PATRON SAINT OF: Rescuers Who Refuse to Be Victims, Ironic Alliances, and Clubwomen
The world knows Lynette Dobbins Taylor as Mrs. Hobart Taylor, the first Negro lady to dance with an American president at his Inaugural Ball.
There were five balls, and the biggest was at the National Guard Armory. Harry Belafonte sang. Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn leaped. Louis Armstrong blew his trumpet. And Lynette danced.
When Lyndon took Lynette out on the dance floor, the cameras flashed. She had a soft pretty face, perfect lips, straight teeth, a little double chin, and freckles under her eyes. Her dress was perfect. A shiny brocade with a demure sweetheart neckline, cap sleeves, and a matching wrap—all very proper matron-who-was-once-a-debutante. Her hair fell in waves. Her earrings were slender dangles of real gold and fine diamonds. In the photograph most papers carried you couldn’t see her single strand of appropriate pearls. You could see her worried pretty face, a woman’s face, a sister’s face, a church lady’s face.
I have seen a lot of dances. I have seen Black women dance with white men. But I have never seen a brown woman like this dance like that with a white man. That dance changed things. It was a warning shot. I loved what those two amateurs did on that dance floor.
Lynette had come a long way from robe-and-road Alabama and she had come via Detroit.
Most of the breadwinners who came from Alabama came from cotton-and-coal Alabama, from working in the cotton fields and the coal mines and the kitchens of the people who owned the cotton fields and the coal mines. There is another colored Alabama, robe-and-road Alabama. Lynette Dobbins Taylor hails from that place.
Robe-and-road Alabama was a world of people who have worn graduation robes, a world of Negro teachers, preachers, professors, and doctors. The more prosperous lived in one of the few nice houses in the colored section of some poverty-stricken hamlet or clogged white city. Others lived in faculty housing in some Negro college town. A few lived in a manse beside a church.
Denizens of robe-and-road Alabama were a peripatetic and studious set who stayed connected to each other by frequent road trips to fellowship, worship, dine, drink, and talk with like-minded souls who now taught at, or perhaps once had attended, or certainly were connected by fraternity, sorority, or lodge ties to, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama A&M, Miles, Oakwood, Stillman, Talladega, Selma Normal, or Alabama Lutheran. Some were transplants who had studied at Fisk, or Howard or Hampton, or Natchez Seminary or Walden Seminary, or Meharry, and any one of the institutes, normals, seminaries, and medical schools where we went to become teachers and preachers, professors and doctors, the places where we lived for two or three or four years in brilliant brown communities, until they were cast out across Alabama like beads on a broken string waiting to be collected at house parties, picnics, revivals, meetings, weddings, and funerals.
May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court announced, “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” robe-and-road Alabama began to vanish, but not before it produced Lynnette Dobbins Taylor.
July 4, 1933. In that year, cotton was selling for six cents a pound. In 1920 it had been selling for 42 cents a pound. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was paying white farmers not to grow cotton. Black sharecroppers were not getting the government bailout and they were not getting the work; they were particularly hard-hit.
Black coal miners, about half of all coal miners in Alabama, were doing a little better if they could ignore headlines like “Negro Miner Meets a Horrible Death” and “Miners Entombed in Mines Near Tuscaloosa: No Hope for Buried Men” and “All the Men Working on a Short Night Shift Die in Mine at Moffatt” and “Colored Miner Killed.” It was reported that in 1933 no Alabama men died in the mines. They died in ’32, they died in ’34.
It was this summer of cotton-and-coal and robe-and-road Alabama: Fighting fear of falls, fire, entombment, the possibility that cotton prices would never rise again, and lynching. Three Blacks were lynched in Alabama in 1933. Colored Alabama teachers understood teaching to be a revolutionary act that might help someone have a choice besides cotton and coal. They treasured the respite that the summer break provided.
In July of ’33 Lynette was fourteen years old and in a month would be headed to college. She had raced through high school, at the head of her class, and would have a college degree and be teaching in a classroom of her own by age twenty.
But first there was a picnic out by the lake. Lynette attended with her parents, four siblings, and friends and neighbors from both her worlds, coal-and-cotton, and robe-and-road Alabama. Some had traveled three hours by car to get to the gathering, and some had walked from the colored section of one of the model villages developed near the coal camp.
The Fourth of July. This is how I tell it: Lynette swims in Seven-Mile Lake with her youngest brother. He starts to flail. She tries to help him. Her brother pushes down on her and she goes under the water. Luckily, she thinks to dive even deeper. He lets her go. She swims beneath the water, emerging out of his reach. Then swims back to him. He attacks her once again. Once more, she dives deep, swims away, but this time when she comes up she yells, she waves her arms. She screams. Her brother is not screaming. He is drowning. Her father is wading in. He’s a strong swimmer. He reaches his son, but his son doesn’t reach back or swim away. He flails at the father. His son pushes him beneath the water. His son gets high enough on his father’s back to spit water and scream. She waits for her father to break her brother’s grasp to dive beneath the surface as she had done. But he won’t risk bringing his boy back under the water. A stick floats on the water. Beneath the water the father prays. Lynette knows her father, so she knows this. And she knows what he’s praying. She grabs the stick. She hits her brother with the stick. He stops screaming, and he doesn’t struggle. She grabs her brother’s dazed, Daddy-rescued, body from behind and starts swimming him into shore. There is no time to look behind her, no time till she gets her brother safely to shore. When she looks, all she sees is water. It will be hours before her father’s body is found.
There will be a funeral. People will come from all the college towns. Her mother, the widow, will move forward with five children and land in Detroit.
What was the Fourth of July to the Negro A. G. Dobbins, elementary school principal? It was the day he projected, in a flash, what would happen if he didn’t go into the water. He saw two of his children drowning. He imagined dead bodies carried out from the water. He wasn’t having it. When he ran into the water, that teacher who never cursed was hollering, “Hell no!” And when Lynette swung that stick, she was weeping and whispering, “No, Daddy, no!” A. G. was happy to die. He had not married a fine woman to give her five children and then ask her to stand with him to bury two. He wouldn’t let his Louise lose a son and a daughter in a lake, at a picnic on a pretty day. The Fourth of July was the day the Negro A. G. Dobbins taught his daughter to do whatever she needed to do to survive. Her survival and her brother’s survival were so essential that he was willing to buy it at the price of his life and the price of her innocence.
The way I see it, if her father had not died, Lynette likely would have settled down to serve and live in Alabama. But he did die. So, she married at twenty, divorced, then married again at twenty-five. After two divorces she married again at thirty, a Black millionaire’s son from Texas, Hobart Taylor. She lived in a fourteen-room house on Detroit’s Boston Boulevard with Hobart and she rose to become a principal just like her daddy, and like her daddy started saving lives in classrooms. Lynette Dobbins was our first female elementary school principal in the Detroit public school system. She had a master’s in education from Wayne State University. In 1958, it was Lynette who chose the models and the music for the March of Dimes Fashion Extravaganza and Lynette who attacked the production of the show with the professionalism of a great Broadway entrepreneur. She had the marvelous Maxine Powell on her side working in a variety of capacities, not limited to director, model, resident psychologist, and stagehand. But the March of Dimes was The Lynette Show.
People will say her father rescued her brother. She will let people say that. And when she is dancing with LBJ, she will be thinking of how far she and her little brother came from the waters of Seven-Mile Lake because her father made a sacrifice that bought them both seconds of crucial time, time for her to think, time for her brother to spit and breathe.
Sacrifice, that’s what Lynette was thinking about on January 20, 1965, when Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of these United States, dressed in white tie and tails, whirled her around the ballroom floor. That and this: Earlier in the day, some 200 colored people had been arrested in Selma when they tried to register to vote in the Dallas County Courthouse. As she moved around the dance floor, she feared she would get whiplash, but she kept stepping.
In Washington, Black power was on the rise. The Civil Rights Act had been signed. I predicted it would prove to be a death knell to Idlewild and to so much more, including many of our beloved historically Black colleges and universities, but we were ready to accept the loss to achieve the coming gains. Hobart was cochairing the inauguration, another Black first. Rumor had it that more than 5,000 sepians who had gone “all the way with LBJ” were striding into the nation’s capital to celebrate the victory. Things were different in Alabama, which meant things were different in Detroit. Lynette was thinking about how she could mobilize her robe and road and cotton and coal troops as she twirled through LBJ’s Inaugural Ball.
In January of 1965 it seemed that a phrase Hobart Taylor had coined, “Affirmative Action,” when he first went to Washington and started working with then–Vice President Johnson down an Old Executive Building hallway from Ofield Dukes, would become an affirmative reality under now President Johnson.
In Detroit we understand the phrase “Affirmative Action” a little different than they do in the rest of the world. In Detroit it means: Take a step, don’t step back, don’t talk, don’t wait—act! Knock your brother upside his head and drag him through the water, but save his life. Affirmative action is a lifesaving dance.
When Lynette Dobbins was just fourteen years old, she saw her daddy die and got over it. Affirmative action. I’ve got a schoolhouse of gals learning that Black girl dance. That’s Motown Magic, too.
* * *
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF LYNETTE TAYLOR:
A Dance That Changes Things
1 jigger of Old Tom gin
Ginger ale
Pour gin into a tall, thin glass. Fill with ice and top with ginger ale.
* * *
Week 39
Thirty-Ninth Sunday after Father’s Day
Colored Girl’s mother did not keep journals, she kept steno pads, spiral wire bound at the top, dated in ink on the front, and ruled down the middle. There were hundreds. A single steno pad marked “November 1992” was packed in with the box of papers Colored Girl inherited. She removed one entry and threw away the rest of the pad.
* * *
Colored Girl doesn’t know why I left Detroit. I like confusing her.
Part of it was Bob Dylan. Ziggy helped me get to the March on Washington. That changed everything. Washington intoxicated me. I wanted that boy who sang “Only a Pawn in their Game.” When Dylan came to Detroit, in October of 1964, and then again 1965 at Cobo Hall, I was backstage. And I believed if I could win George, I could win any man. Dylan was a lot less than George, at least that’s how it looked in Detroit in 1964 and 1965. I planned on seeing him when we went to the World’s Fair in 1967 but that didn’t happen. But from the first we were together, I knew if I got the chance, I could keep him for a while. I thought my chance was in Washington. I didn’t realize how good Dylan thought Detroit looked on me. When I saw him in New York he had moved on.
Everybody was moving on. When they first dressed the Supremes, they dressed them to look like me. In 1961 I was the most elegant woman in Detroit and they were . . . well, ghetto girls. By 1965, they had been to London, and Glasgow and Hamburg, and Paris, and I had been nowhere but Detroit. The summer of 1967, about the time we headed to the World’s Fair in New York, things that should have been happening in Motown were happening in Hollywood, like it being announced that the Supremes were no longer the Supremes—but “Diana Ross and the Supremes.” According to the grapevine, one or more Gordys were looking to buy a house in Hollywood, Bel Air, or Beverly Hills, not Palmer Park. And back in Detroit the bougie ones who didn’t invite me into their fancy lady clubs, who were married to doctors and lawyers, were dancing with presidents and kings in other cities and coming back to brag up and down Boston Boulevard. George couldn’t give me any of that. What I learned from Dylan? Change your name. Change the way you talk. Change your history. Change your clothes. Shoot for the stars.
I took the girl, because as long as I had her, if I needed Detroit, Detroit would save me, to protect the girl. Without the girl, Detroit would forget me. Simple as that. She was an insurance policy. That’s all I intended. But taking Colored Girl did more than that. It killed George’s sister. It wounded George. And it hurt Ziggy more than I thought it would. Ziggy tried to use the wound to his advantage. He left his book to her and sent it to me. He said he was getting the book out of Detroit because Detroit was busting up. Said it would rise again and the book would be one of the seeds. If I could have done that for Ziggy, I would have. I loved that little man. But I couldn’t keep that book. Everything I told Colored Girl about Detroit was defeated by Ziggy’s book. Everything she believed or suspected about Detroit was affirmed by Ziggy’s book. I told her Detroit was shit. I told her Black Bottom was mud. I let her know her daddy wasn’t anything more than a man born to clean other people’s dirty clothes. If she didn’t believe me, she stopped saying otherwise. Ziggy’s book would have changed all of that. I burned the thing, kept the ashes, and tickled myself by thinking of what she would think when she saw those ashes. What didn’t kill her would make her stronger.
I always thought she was me. It’s never wrong to touch yourself. Colored Girl doesn’t think she belongs to me. She says, “I’m your daughter, I’m not your slave.” I am very angry at Colored Girl. That’s the only thing we agree on: I am very angry at Colored Girl.
My shrink says, because I felt powerless as a child, I try to exert strict control over my daughter so that I might create an idealized version of a family that can never exist. I say it came very close to existing in Middleburg. Then she almost killed me in West Virginia. After West Virginia I mainly left that girl alone. There is more George Stanley in Colored Girl than one might think. She used a river and a rubber raft to half choke the life out of me with water.
